Corpus Christi Carroll

Corpus Christi CarrollNicholas Shapiro Liam Whittier, the junior house master at a boys boarding school, is able to drift through life, feckless and disaffected, until the arrival of a new boarder, the fourteen year old Corpus Christi Carroll Almost at once he falls in love aesthetically obsessed, seeking to possess the new boy, who has arrived with secrets of his own The plot is interspersed with flashbackLiam Whittier, the junior house master at a boys boarding school, is able to drift through life, feckless and disaffected, until the arrival of a new boarder, the fourteen year old Corpus Christi Carroll Almost at once he falls in love aesthetically obsessed, seeking to possess the new boy, who has arrived with secrets of his own The plot is interspersed with flashbacks to Whittier s earlier life In these sections, the depiction of a close knit, modest family adds a naturalness that opens up the novel and leads gradually to the culmination of the plot in the present.Corpus Christi Carroll is a literary work, evoking, in theme and style, Nabokov s Lolita, and Thomas Mann s Death in Venice Louche, melancholy, though with a quizzical, modern eye for the absurd, the novel follows the narrator as he reels between lyric idealism and sated regret, dizzy desire and the dingy truth With modern cultural relevance, Corpus Christi Carroll is a universal tale of obsession, love and death, fashioned from a particular life.